[applause]
So, we're contracted to undertake this research on behalf of Te Pou,
looking at the media reporting of suicide.
And in no way do I profess to be an expert in the topic of suicide.
I'm a researcher, and what we did is we gathered a group of experts around,
created a team,
and it was the team that I'm speaking on behalf of today,
and representing in this particular forum.
So that team consisted of a sociologist, I was leading the team,
we had a mental health service user, who was an academic, who was part of that team.
We had a clinician, who is also an academic,
and we had a media analysis expert involved.
And we had a journalist.
And we also established an expert reference group
of both academics and cultural experts
that we constantly liaised with as we went through the research process.
So we've got a huge public health issue out there around suicide.
There's already been mention of the approximately 500 deaths annually.
But there's also a lot of suicide-related behaviour
that ends up in our hospitals.
But there's quite a bit of literature, quite a cluster of literature,
which talks about the impact of negative reporting on,
and sensational reporting on rates of suicide.
So the response internationally to that, you're all probably aware of,
is that there's sets of guidelines that have been established through the World Health Organization.
And in this country, we've followed along that international trend,
and in 1998, and then revised in 1999, we have a set of guidelines
to assist journalists in the reporting of suicide.
We also have, in the Coroners Act,
which puts further control on how that information
about individual events is disseminated through the media.
Trouble is, we've got these preventative interventions that have occurred,
but we've got no evidence about the specific effectiveness
of those interventions within our particular country.
So we embarked on a research process which, its aims were to initially
describe what the reporting looked like
to look at the extent around quality in terms of that reporting,
the extent to which the, if we look at the guidelines which represent the best evidence
of what needs to occur, translating across into the quality of reporting.
Given that those first two aims are fairly broad and fairly descriptive,
we were asked by the Ministry to drill down and look at five case studies,
to look in more depth, in terms of the reporting approaches used by the media,
and this wasn't something, as I said, that we designed,
and in fact it replicates a similar study which was undertaken by Jane Pirkis and colleagues,
first off, I think around 2001 in Australia,
and we adapted that particular design to a New Zealand context.
So what we did, is we did this broad description over one year,
the date was August first 2008 through to the end of July 2009.
And we covered news. Items in the newspaper,
and what I mean by the newspaper is just not the Herald and national newspapers
but community newspapers.
We looked at TV, news representations on the TV,
on the radio. We didn't look at talkback and those sorts of approaches to
radio discussion around suicide,
and we looked at specific internet news sites.
We then took a 10% random sample of each of those areas,
and we applied a set of quality indicators to that 10% random sample
in relationship to the guidelines, as I discussed before.
And we looked at five specific case studies.
The five case studies we looked at were suicide in relationship to celebrity status,
we looked at suicide in relationship to new technology, primarily the internet,
we looked at the issue of murder-suicide,
economic crisis and suicide,
and suicide events in relationship to mental health services.
In terms of the finding, what we had over that 12 month period is nearly 3500 items
for us to review as a group of researchers.
Is that a lot of reporting?
Well yes, it is if we start to compare it with what's occurred in Australia.
The original Pirkis study looked at about 3700 items in their study.
Was this sort of smooth reporting over the whole year?
No it wasn't. We saw spikes in the reporting,
and the spikes in the reporting related specifically to the David Bain retrial.
Because there was frequent mention about the possibility of a defence
around the issues of murder-suicide.
As soon as murder-suicide came up,
it was retrieved by us for analysis.
There was also a spike, as you probably know,
around three alleged attempted suicide events
involving a well-known sports presenter on television.
In terms of where in the media were the majority of these items presented?
In the newspapers. The newspapers accounted for about 50% of the reporting.
And if you start to look at what is the topics,
what is the subject matter of the specific reporting,
if you just look at the newspaper, over 50% of the reporting was about completed suicides.
So if you sort of say, okay, is this representation of what's occurring in the media,
what we call "mass mediated reality,"
does that actually equals the official statistics about what suicide is all about
and who's involved? No it doesn't.
We know that there's some variation in the statistics around culture,
and around gender, and yet, those specific variations weren't picked up in the media.
There's some indication that there's...
Well there is, we know, from the statistics I talked about earlier,
that there's a whole lot of suicide-related behaviour,
and yet the reality is that the media tends to pick up on the extreme end,
in relationship to completed suicide.
And there is quite a... when methods were discussed in the particular items,
there was often reference to the use of firearms,
and we know that in the New Zealand context that
that in fact isn't the most common means by which suicide is completed.
We then applied those quality indicators that I referred to before,
to this 10%, and we found that in most cases,
and this is contrary to the international literature,
that in most cases, that quality did seem to exist in the reporting that we analysed.
For instance, one of the criteria in the guidelines is about
the topics of suicide shouldn't be projected on the front page of the newspaper.
And we in fact found that tended to be abided by within the items that we reviewed.
The notion of avoiding detailed descriptions of the methods that were used
in the individual events, again, those were abided by.
And the avoidance of using visuals which reinforces, and potentially sensationalises,
the events, were also by and large not used by the media.
That doesn't say that we didn't detect some areas for improvement,
and the areas of improvement: we know overwhelmingly
that mental health sits in relationship to suicidal behaviour,
and yet you didn't often see links between mental illness and suicidal behaviour.
Also in the guidelines they talk about the value of good news stories,
where people have grappled with incredible difficulties,
but have overcome those difficulties by adapting coping mechanisms
which don't involve suicidal behaviour,
you don't tend to see those sorts of events portrayed within the media.
The guidelines also talk about acknowledging the fact that
vulnerable people may be exposed to the media material,
they recommend that in fact at the end of the items,
people should be highlighting where people can go to for assistance,
and again, we found that that wasn't a particular proactive, preventive strategy
that was adopted a lot within our own news media.
So in terms of the case study around celebrity status and suicide,
we found that within this particular case study,
some of the worst and some of the best examples of good reporting of suicide.
And this case study did capture the high profile
three alleged suicides that I referred to before.
Some of the worst examples occurred in the alleged first suicide attempt,
and this involved page one portrayal of the incident,
font which was huge, which was sprawled across the page,
detail about the attempt, the method of attempt,
photographs about where the attempt took place.
And yet, at the time of the third attempt, we saw some of the best reporting
in relationship to people saying, "Hey, what's going on here?"
You know, "What's the relationship between what's occuring and this person's psychological state,"
and there was the bringing in of experts to comment on those sorts of issues.
In terms of the case study around murder-suicide,
there was a choice open to the media.
Invariably, we found that journalists tended to focus on murder,
except in one particular case, which occurred in Christchurch,
and in that particular case, there was reference to the cultural background
of the people involved in that event,
and there was a degree of cultural stereotyping around the extent to which
this action was taken in response to the economic collapse of their business
and this event had taken place in relationship to
this sense of needing to "save face."
The third case study related to economic crisis and suicide.
And we know that internationally, the economic crisis that has hit
modern industrialised societies over the last couple of years
has affected many families, and yet the focus
in the media tended to be on the very wealthy.
Although there was some kind of indication of mental health issues
also going on with these particular individuals,
there tended to be a portrayal, a framing around
the extent to which suicide was an accepted response to the economic turmoil
that these individuals were going through,
as opposed to an intermediatary step
where these people were obviously experiencing hopelessness and helplessness,
and that was feeding into probably
some kind of psychological response,
which may then have been translated into the behaviour around suicide.
In terms of the case study around new technology,
this is a fascinating topic, quite a frightening topic to be looking at
even in terms of how the media were confronting it.
Some of the examples of the reporting were around text bullying,
and text bullying leading to a particular event,
which was a completed suicide.
There was the whole notion of people accessing "how to do" websites.
There was one particular reporting incident involving a New Zealand woman
who was accessing these sites and then went on to complete suicide.
And then there was the particular horrific event,
which involved the filming of a suicide being undertaken on the internet.
The sort of framing analysis that occurred in terms of the media's response
was a projection of, really, technology out of control.
And there was a whole highlight on the problem,
but very few reference in the journalists' interpretation of those events
in relationship to solution.
The last case study was about mental health services,
and suicide events.
And for the first time, in terms of our analysis of the media,
we found the development of apportion of blame
in relation to the events that had taken place.
And the blame often related in terms of the way that the articles were framed,
to failure of services. Failure of services to accommodate the needs
of these particular people.
What we found, and this is just our commentary,
this is just our analysis, and we're not putting any value judgement on this,
but what was missing in the discussions in the media
was the voice of the services themselves.
There's probably a whole lot of institutional and legal
inability for that voice to be brought forward,
but it certainly is missing
in relationship to the way that those particular events were portrayed.
Overall, the media seems to be doing a really good job.
Of course, our research doesn't answer any questions as to why.
Some people might say, "Well, it's doing a good job because we've got
things like the guidelines in place."
Though there was a study undertaken in Christchurch by Jim Tully and colleagues,
a journalist academic,
and he tended to highlight that media experts often don't use the guidelines,
in terms of, to inform the way that they report about these particular events.
We could say that we're doing...
maybe it's being represented well within the media
because of the Coroners Act,
and the restrictions placed under the Coroners Act.
Well, journalists themselves might say, "Well, it's good quality because
in New Zealand, journalists are involved in good, ethical reporting."
So it's about the standard of reporting that just naturally occurs.
So do we need the guidelines?
So this is a debate that's occurring in the media at the moment.
I personally believe that guidelines for any group of professionals are a good thing.
Now we constantly have new practitioners coming on board,
the ideas of guidelines is that they give some assistance
to new people developing in the profession as to the expected standard,
and they also help to maintain and give a clear signal,
as to what that standard is within the profession concerned.
I personally, it's 12 years since these guidelines were introduced,
and I must admit, from a research perspective,
we had trouble initially as researchers in terms of
interpreting some of these guidelines.
Because they're very broad, some of them are very broad,
and open to a degree of subjectivity and interpretation.
So there's probably a need to go back to the guidelines and revise them.
There is certainly a need to incorporate major stakeholders in that revision.
And primarily journalists, if we're looking at
what guidelines are intended to do.
The guidelines would go nowhere unless
probably journalists are driving those particular processes.
Do we need the Coroners Act?
Well again, if you've been reading the paper over the last couple of months,
the Chief Coroner has already started to open that particular debate.
The extent to which, you know, extra information
that can come through from specific events,
may, in fact, help to inform and open
a more rigorous and robust public discussion.
And I know the Coroner's been talking about the extent to which, maybe,
there is a need to give some kind of guidelines to individual coroners
about what might be better to release in certain circumstances.
So that's generally an overview.
As much as you can possibly do in a very short time.
The full research report is on the Te Pou website.
So it's open for your perusal.
And as I say, as an academic, I'm always keen to engage in the conversations
of individuals and groups in relationship to the findings of that particular study.
So, thanks very much.
[applause]